I voted other. It's all just magic, as far as I'm concerned. Sure maybe some god had a hand in it, but I couldn't say which one. Gaia, maybe? Anyway, it's way cool that life has evolved so diversely, and yet so simply.

DG, I get what you're saying. Also, it's not unreasonable to assume that most people who believe in God on these message boards are a part of the Abrahamic traditions as opposed to Eastern traditions or something. I'm just saying, in this thread it has looked like people are generally assuming "belief in theistic evolution = belief in an omnipotent creator". Which isn't necessarily a crazy assumption, but it's also not necessarily an all-encompassing one.

I know this wasn't directed to me, but to answer: I don't think God has to be omnipotent or omniscient in the way people generally describe omnipotence/omniscience. Still the most powerful/knowledgable force, but not necessary to be omnipotent/omniscient. Maybe God is omnipotent and omniscient, maybe God isn't, whatever.

It's not really a big deal to me. I believe God is powerful and knowing where it counts; that God understands/controls and is responsible for the processes of nature, and knows our hearts and minds, and is powerful enough to ensure everlasting spiritual life for us all.

But why not? Or, why would a god put all these convoluted, arbitrary, and inefficient mechanisms into place and just leave it alone?

Why would it be inefficient for God, when God has infinite time/energy/resources?

The vast majority of genetic mutations are not beneficial, and many are harmful; the vast majority of species that have ever lived are extinct. I'd say that leaving a billion-year pile of corpses in our wake just to reach this our-immune-systems-respond-to-infections-by-cooking-our-brains point is pretty inefficient. And I know you're just going to use the omnipotence/omniscience/"God is outside of time" trump card. Dammit, Vivec, I try to keep my mouth shut about this but you had to post the thread!

Eh, just doesn't seem like quite the right register for these types of discussions. Although I will confess that as a student of Judaism, I do have an affinity for using words that are derived from it. It's actually rather astonishing how many of them are ingrained in our language, the vast majority of speakers being completely unaware of their Biblical provenance. (My favorite: the word "shibboleth" being used as an...erm...shibboleth, in the Book of Judges)

I was actually considering about starting a discussion along those lines...I recently read a biography of Richard Ramirez, "The Night Stalker" and was pretty fascinated by him(yeah, yeah, yeah). What's extremely provocative about him in particular is that while killers like Jeffrey Dahmer were sociopaths with deadly compulsions, I've never really thought he was "evil". Ramirez, though, is a completely different animal. He absolutely knew he was terrorizing people, and while killing was a compulsion for him, he also was doing it just for the sake of terrorizing people. I don't really believe in metaphysical "good" and "evil", but Richard Ramirez has forced me to think about it more closely than I ever had before.

Evolution doesn't have a goal, every organism currently alive is equally evolved, every scientist and student of science knows that. Of course organisms aren't perfect.

Of course it's purposeless. I know that. I just assumed that if you believed there was some conscious creator behind it, that it did have a purpose. I'm just saying that if I were all-powerful, I could come up with something better that didn't cause eons of suffering and didn't make an infinite amount of mistakes and didn't continue indefinitely (until all life is gone) and the whole thing was a mistake and **** it let's just sit around waiting for the stars to burn out and atoms to fall apart.